October 2012

10/17/2012

In non-potty news, it feels like change is still rapid, even after the two year mark. Jumping is now mastered and she's starting to try jumping off of things.

In the wake of potty training (possibly fueled by being shortchanged on sleep and having a new mastery of the universe) there were some tantrums and we're having to become cleverer about avoiding conflict.

In her play, she's becoming more independent, playing for longer and with more open-ended toys like trains and duplo. With the latter, she's really been focused on building things for the little play people to enjoy and setting up scenes for them. In the past week or so, an obsession with independent reading (of books she was previously totally bored with) has surfaced.

Language-wise, she's quite the talker and is becoming more confident about talking to other people and strangers. She's also starting to work on asking questions such as "who is that?"

Physically, we learned at her 2-year visit that she's around 90th percentile on height and weight, making her the size of an average 3 year old.

On what was admittedly a bit of a whim, we decided to try potty training starting the day after Kate's birthday party. The timing seemed good...we had some quiet days ahead and it was either then or wait a long time for the dust to settle after our new addition (due early Dec) . There ended up being some other pluses to the timing too: the house was full of new toys to occupy us while we hunkered down and we had leftover salty snacks and juice to increase the frequency of teachable moments.

We did a self-styled "boot camp" approach in which we introduced the concept, had some failures and kept trying again. During this time, Kate wore cotton training pants or went bottomless. We weren't dead set against rewards, but it became pretty obvious early on that Kate was on board and was entirely self motivated. Seeing her work at this project and be successful and very proud of herself was actually much more rewarding than ditching the diapers.

By the end of day 3 we were over the hump, but at that point we realized that there was going to be a slow process of rebuilding our lives. For one, we had to wean her off bad habits that had been allowed or established during boot camp (more screen time, drinking juice etc). For another, we had to get comfortable with leaving the house, first for a quick trip to the park, then for longer trips.

At this point, our schedule has returned to normal and Kate hasn't had an accident in weeks. We're still leaving the house with a toilet in tow (either in the form of a seat to make her more comfortable on an adult toilet or a little potty to use at the park). That's not ideal but it's the changes to her sleep habits that are on the front burner.

We never intended that she would be nighttime trained at this age but she took to the notion of bladder control so heartily that she refuses to use a diaper at night. She wakes up to pee and often has trouble falling back asleep, resulting in less sleep for everyone. No one warned us of this!!! Still, we're very proud of our little big girl.